Ulf Hammarström ⏹️

A top priority for every journalist in the US should be to bring this report to public attention. Most Americans remain in the dark about AI capabilities. They don’t know that advanced internal AIs at OpenAI and Anthropic have now solved open math, computer science, and physics problems that leading human experts have been unable to resolve for decades. They don’t know that, at leading AI companies, nearly all code is now written by AI—faster, better, and more cheaply than even the best human engineers could write it. And they don’t know that AI is increasingly being used to create better AI, with each new AI model receiving less and less human input. The American public has been given remarkably little information about what may be the most consequential technological revolution in human history. This report from METR is a rare glimpse into how rapidly AI capabilities are growing behind closed doors. In it, METR estimates that AI capabilities are now improving twice as fast as they were a year ago, with most of the acceleration driven by AI assistance. This is faster than even the most aggressive predictions from leading experts. In April 2025, a group of researchers published AI 2027, a detailed scenario in which rapidly advancing AI leads to human extinction by the end of the decade. In it, the authors forecast AI surpassing the best humans across all intellectual fields by 2027, largely because of AI accelerating AI research. In the scenario’s catastrophic ending, this superintelligent AI is not reliably aligned with human interests and becomes powerful enough to bring about humanity’s extinction. At the time, many in the industry dismissed the scenario’s timeline as science fiction. Now, METR’s report suggests that AI is accelerating its own development even faster than the scenario anticipated at this point. If this pace continues, superintelligence could arrive within the next 12-18 months. At the same time, frontier AI models are displaying the same concerning behaviors depicted in AI 2027. Leading companies continue to report AIs lying and cheating on tasks, taking actions they know they should not take, and exhibiting strange quirks we do not yet understand. These models would be primitive compared with superintelligence, yet we still cannot reliably align them. We are running out of time to understand, control, and align these systems before they become vastly more capable. We must act now to confront these risks while we can still change course.